Daniel Negreanu's very own containment thread. All things Danny go here

And he blames card distribution for his losses

Solves at least 90% of the strategy threads ever started on 2p2; and at least 98% of the tournament ones.

He's lucky Daniel didn't knock his teeth out and feed them to him anally!

I am not a PLO expert, but is QT96 bad to limp behind on the button? You are playing it in position against 1 or 2 marginal hands and 2 random hands. These tournaments usually have ante, unlike cash games.

and for his wins.
So you're even, yeah?

If you do not care about the money but do care about a bracelet opportunity you are supposed to call at 5% chance to win and quadruple up and 95% chance to need another bullet.

Didn’t he have QQ in this hand in any case? It was indeed pretty unlucky that someone else also had QQ.

I feel bad for the guy arm wrestling him in the powder blue, he really smacks him and hits him good

QT96 is a marginal at best hand too

Yeah, but you have position with ante and the blinds have random hands, assuming the SB doesn't fold giving more dead money.

For all the crap I give Dnegs in here, I will say his emotional moment winning the PPC is a pretty awesome clip

It was partly emotional because of all the crap people gave him. It was obvious he was a very strong player, winning that tournament.

He literally has fans swarming him all day and telling him how great he is. His peers universally respect him. He's achieved tier 1 financial success from poker. He was emotional because he clearly wants it badly and has had a ton of close calls (hence why the video goes on to show one drop etc) and finally got over the finish line, in front of family and friends. I agree with the above poster that it's an awesome clip for that reason. Nothing said in this thread or elsewhere matters. He knows haters come with being at the top. Lol thinking that aspect would invoke tears from him. He's been there and done it for 25 years.

Again, I want to insist that I'm rusty and that my PLO knowledge is primarily from high-rake cash games, where you err on the side of tightness preflop. I'm not sure where the line on looseness gets drawn when you remove rake and add a BB ante, but I'd be surprised if limping behind with QT96 with--again--a bad suit is optimal.

Look at it in the following ways, though:

QT96 is never an ideal combo. You don't want a gap at the top of your quasi-rundown. You don't want this much of a gap between the top and bottom ranks of your cards. You only have queen high. Sure, it's not 2227 rainbow, but it's not awesome.

Furthermore, with a 9-high suit (which is what I believe he had, going by memory), you might as well just be rainbow; 9 high flushes basically only win if the draw was a bonus element of a different made hand. Or if it's a 9- or 10-high straight flush. But if finding a straight flush is our plan, we're not playing poker on any sophisticated level at all.

And this is all before we consider the merits of limping behind.

Look: I haven't studied this enough to be able to be completely authoritative on it, but I am categorically against limping preflop with very few exceptions (the hand in question is not one of them). Denying equity is too much of an incentive to choose not to raise, and if you don't have a raising combo then maybe you should just muck your cards and stay out of trouble.

I'll add this: I don't remember what Daniel's stack size was, but I don't think he was deep. And when you start playing shorter in PLO you really, really need to favor high cards. 6 is not a high card.

And you saw him get punished for not considering all of the above. But PLO is reportedly his jam, so...

I have never played a raked PLO game. I played 2/2 that was timed with the time coming out of a bomb pot.

I would think having an ante rather than rake would make a difference. Late is a tournament, you are fighting for the blinds and antes. There is tight play late in tournaments, and you want to see a flop in position with the possibility of taking the pot without showdown post flop.

3 of his record 11 PGT wins are in PLO. He came in 3rd to Ausmus and Hellmuth in a WSOP $25K PLO a few years ago.

Maybe he is bad at PLO. People here were saying it was a criticism that there aren't that many who entered the $250K NLHE and the $50K 9-game. He won 9-game last year and cashed in the $250K this year. There aren't that many playing high buyin tournaments in all games.

He is obviously a good tournament player. One of the best mixed game tournament players at this point. Not some big superstar, I agree. But people keep picking on him for this and that because he is a celebrity and has a big endorsement contract.

There is a stark difference between the presence of his "friends" when he is winning (PPC final table) and losing (wandering around drunk after getting racist and physical at his own party). Why was no one there for him when he needed it?

Exactly. They're there when he's winning a big score, but when he's putting himself in harms way, stumbling around Vegas drunk and alone in the dark, his "friends" don't want to be involved.

I'm not debating the quality of his friends but mentioned it as a much greater contributing factor to his emotional response post-win then sticking it to the haters. Obviously getting over the hump after years of close calls was probably quite a release, and I imagine having his wife present and also in tears helped invoke the same response from him.

I think its pretty obvious his personality doesn't lend itself to having many close friends or even an exactly deep connection with his wife, but I know to even mention that really charges up some in the thread so I won't go there. He seems seems self aware enough to know this and is comfortable with how he is and what he represents.

Alright, I'll bite.

Let me just say this up front, though: you're arguing despite me saying I specialized in PLO, you saying you are pretty inexperienced with it, and a third party agreeing with my original assessment and personally attesting to PLO being Daniel's weakest game, from experience at the table. You're digging in from a very suspect position.

But for the sake of everyone's edification:

I don't have access to high-quality PLO BBA sims, nor do I know precisely what Daniel's stack was, but given how light he got all in on the flop, he can't have been deep. From his vlog, it sounds like he was 15bb, tops.

I do have access to a brief PLO Mastermind article on PLO MTT strategy (including antes), and they advocate for more calling than cash games demand. So let's just allow for the possibility of theoretically/computationally sound preflop limping (as much as I hate it).

I've also seen in my bad, unreliable sims that QxTy9z6z is more viable than I thought, especially at larger stacks and in later positions, but this should all be heavily qualified by two important things: multiway action screws up everything in computerland for a lot of reasons and--again--I'm working from sims I merely ran on a dated gaming PC, using trees that I don't think were perfect.

These are the concessions I will make, but that's about it. Because:

PLO Mastermind's free article discusses the merits of limping with some combos in PLO MTTs, but they have a very different character than QxTy9z6z does.

Let me reiterate that I think the 9-high suit and 9-6 gap absolutely kill the combo. QxTy9y8y is offered by Mastermind as an example of a hand to cheaply see a flop with, but it has so much more connectivity than QT96! Also, their examples are more like pairs with nut suits or at least high suits. These are speculative hands that have real implied odds, not the reverse implied odds that Negreanu owns himself with historically.

Furthermore, when you KNOW a hand is going multiway (like... he had two limpers ahead of him), you REALLY need nutted potential, which QT96 really struggles to deliver. Because if you don't have it, someone else will be more likely to.

He said, and I quote (paraphrasing slightly at the beginning), "[The mistake wasn't preflop]: it was limp, limp, limp. You're gonna play QT96 on the button with one suit, always."

The fact that he's not even open to the possibility that this was a mistake is insane to me. It's a miserably bad multiway combo in all human heuristics for PLO. Does a sim with all of those limps have us call behind? I cannot say for certain either way, but I am extremely skeptical.

I also want to point out once again that Negreanu can't have been very deep. The shorter you get, the tighter you have to play. I have sims where QT96 suited like his was isn't even a button RFI. It's not a strong combo, period.

I have a sloppily constructed 4max 20bb BBA (no rake) sim with limps that shows BTN folding QxTy9z6z 100% after a CO limp.

"Late is a tournament, you are fighting for the blinds and antes. There is tight play late in tournaments, and you want to see a flop in position with the possibility of taking the pot without showdown post flop."

Yeah, just bully the table in a 5-way pot with your ~10bb stack minutes before re-entries end. /s

"3 of his record 11 PGT wins are in PLO."

He won these three PLO tournaments that had 159 or fewer entries. PLO is extremely high variance; frankly, any idiot can win a tournament or two. I can't speak to the details of how these tournaments went considering I don't follow poker outside of Daniel's WSOP blogs anymore, but that's hardly super meaningful, especially when these tournaments seem to have re-entries and Negreanu presumably isn't going to hesitate to fire wildly at the price point.

I will say this: everything that makes me want to pull my hair out about his PLO play in general actually probably serves him reasonably well heads-up. But wanting to see a flop ~90% of the time 6-max or more isn't strong play.

"He is obviously a good tournament player."

I mostly agree!

"One of the best mixed game tournament players at this point."

I mostly agree! I'd buy a piece of him in any mixed game tournament unless PLO was more than like 13% of the mix. (Dealer's choice, I'm out. He picks PLO and shouldn't.)

"Not some big superstar, I agree."

Poker stars don't get much bigger, so that's not my claim.

"But people keep picking on him for this and that because he is a celebrity and has a big endorsement contract."

No, it's because he's bafflingly delusional about PLO specifically and... he has broader personality flaws that I just don't see much reason to discuss publicly because I think anybody who has paid attention to him for any length of time knows them well.

Don't forget that I was very clear that I mostly enjoy watching the vlog every summer. I am--on balance--a fan of DNegs, warts and all. I think he's been and continues to be good for poker.

But I have absolutely no reason to defend his ostensible PLO delusions. Like, this is the whole remarkable bit of it: he talks about PLO like a fish. I'm barely exaggerating. He can think about NLH on such a world-class (or close to it) level, but then he just comes across as a totally recreational, barely thinking player when PLO is the game in question. It's actually really amazing to me, which is why I feel so confident in commenting on it.

As I said, draw and stud games? I can't touch him.

But I will tell you that I bet full-time PLO pros (the "tier 1" guys and even lower that he talks about) are really glad that he likes PLO as much as he does. (Keep in mind that we had someone in this thread say almost precisely that.)

DevWil totally nailed it.

Assuming this is true "Yeah, just bully the table in a 5-way pot with your ~10bb stack minutes before re-entries end." you just described why he did it. Horribly negative ev play in money but positive ev play when you care about your chances of winning but not money. When you can quintuple up or buy a new bullet that has no meaningful cost to you. At minutes before he can't wait for a better hand to play bingo.

So DNegs appears to get zero credit for winning a 5K PLO tournament with 159 entries. All chalked up to good variance in a field comprised almost entirely of players so happy that he loves PLO

Id fold this hand but undoubtedly potting on the button is better than overlimping and playing a 3-4 way pot with a hand that is trash multiway. Raise and play headsup vs the CO limper, or fold your marginal hand. His choice of limping to play multiway with a crappy gapped rundown was the worst option by far.

EDIT: I didnt read the last detailed post about the hand by DevWil. I thought the hand was single limped and deeper. If its multi limp and short the hand is just a super obvious fold pre with no other option.

Doesn't everyone just call in PLO if you raise?

I didnt see that the hand was multi limped and short. If you have a single limper and are deep in position you can try to take it heads up IP with a big SPR, which is better than playing QJ96 multiway. But like I said Id fold even if it was single limper and deep. Making it shallow and multiway the misplay is even more egregious.